others have discussed this idea(see: water has negative calories), but perhaps I've thought of something new

see, the stated problem with drinking really cold water as a way to lose weight is that you don't lose very much. the actual math works out to you losing about 1 calorie per ounce of ice water you drink. (every time I talk about calories here, I am really talking about kilo-calories)

So this doesn't work all that well. But then I thought: what if, instead of drinking water, you ate ice? It takes one calorie to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water one degree Celsius. However, it takes 80 calories to change one kilogram of ice to water. If my math is correct, that means it takes 3.3 calories to heat up one ounce of ice(at 0°) to body temperature.

Now the question is: just how much ice can someone eat in a day? Remember, to lose one pound of weight you'll need to burn 3500 calories.

If you ate one kilogram of ice, you would burn 80 calories in converting it to water, and another 37 calories to raise the water to body temperature, for a total of 117 calories. So, for every five-pound bag of ice you managed to chow down, you'd save yourself roughly 265 calories. Have fun chewing on that much ice.

Even then, there's another nagging problem. The human body deliberately loses about 75 calories per hour to the surrounding environment, in order to avoid overheating. If you were to eat ice and throw that out of balance, the body would compensate by not sweating as much, in order to avoid losing too much body heat. If you do manage to overcome this, your body temperature will begin to drop, but you still won't be burning energy until you begin to shiver, which is the body's last-ditch effort to keep body temperature normal. You might try a different strategy than shivering away calories: you could maintain the heat balance by doing more physical work.

But you were trying to avoid exercise, weren't you?

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